Beginning Perl: From Novice to Professional (Books for Professionals by Professionals) [Kindle Edition]

I use this book to teach Perl in a university course. I feel it does a very good job at exposing just enough of Perl to make it useful without confusing beginning students. I chose this over O'Reilly's Learning Perl (also a good book) because this book goes into References, Modules and a bit of OO Perl, and also has what I feel is slightly better treatment of shortcuts like $_ as well as lexically-scoped variables with 'my'. O'Reilly has broken these topics across two books (Learning Perl and Intermediate Perl), both fine books but I only want the students to have to buy one book. I feel that Perl is not very useful without references, so that was the major reason for switching to this book for a beginning Perl course. I highly recommend it.

Beginning Perl, 2nd edition, by James Lee, et al., is a splendid

introduction to the Perl programming language, version 5.8.3. The flow

of the book is logical, straightforward, and highly readable. Text is

heavily sprinkled with program examples that the reader can easily try

out along the way, as well as exercises at the end of most chapters,

with solutions in the appendix. Chapters are short, clear, and

engaging.

After a brief discussion of the history of Perl and a listing of

numerous helpful online resources, the book quickly moves on to the

logistics of running a Perl program, followed by descriptions of basic

program elements and control flow. Then it's ahead to more

sophisticated data elements - lists, arrays, and hashes - and finally

functions and subroutines.

After a solid and seemingly effortless explanation of these "basics,"

the book moves to one of the most powerful features in Perl - regular

expressions - and how these can be used to access files and data. From

there, the discussion expands to string processing and references. The

book concludes with discussions of more "advanced" Perl features,

including object-orientation, modules, and use with webservers and

databases.

Regardless of topic, the writing style stays crisp, clear, and

example-filled, making this book a highly effective and enjoyable way to

get a jump-start into Perl programming for the novice or a quick

refresher for the expert wanting a Perl 5 update.

This is a very capable introduction to Perl that I think is intended for reasonably experienced programmers. It is not intended to teach Perl as a first computer language, and it does not pander to the reader. The Perl it teaches is strong industry standard Perl that is in line with what could reasonably be considered best practice. That's something in a language that prides itself on having many ways to do one thing.

The book covers the entire topic of Perl from the basics of writing a script, through functions, modules, and into object oriented programming. It also covers vital community information such as the use of CPAN.

If you have not read Programming Perl then I believe you should start there. But if you find that book has too much of a learning curve then I would recommend this book or Learning Perl (O'Reilly.)